I can’t begin to tell you how much this bit terrifies me:

“The judge also realizes that jail time will not reform us, because he has witnessed our faith runs very deep,” the statement reads.

Translation: we did nothing wrong.
Extrapolation: therefor, we’ll do it again if similar situations arise.
Further: Yes, we are OK with killing children in the name of god.

Honestly, I don’t know what to say about this.

6 months plus probation.

At what point do we simply say that child neglect is A-OK?

I mean, seriously, I’m not sure what the details are on this but they did remove the kids and none of them had died.

So, crazy nazi parents are NOT ok, but crazy religious parents with a body count are just fine.

Two families, one has killed their daughter, the other is doing their best to kill their son.
They are, without doubt, fanatics, but…
To the ‘moderates’ who talk about how the fanatics get it all wrong/disgrace your faith/or whatever, to all you people out there who go to church and believe in a god that mucks around in the world, to everyone who thinks religion is a beautiful thing to be encouraged and faith a thing to be proud of:
You
encourage
this.
The same way homophobes who don’t beat gays to death encourage those who do.
The same way people who just didn’t want to be around black people encouraged lynchings.
The same way the hate-mongers on the radio encourage actual violence.
You
enable
this.

Look at yourself, right now.
You spread ignorance and lies.
You beg for people to live in illusion and blindness.
Look at yourself.

Pharyngula

I have to say something that is heartfelt, and is also meant to offend. I do not absolve you mealy-mouthed moderates, I do not regard your beliefs as harmless. If Colleen Hauser or Leilani Neumann were in your church, you’d tell them to get medical care, but you’d also validate their belief in prayers. You would provide the soothing background muzak that says prayer is good, prayer is virtuous, prayer will connect you to the great lord who can do anything, prayer will give you solace in your time of worry. You would not raise your voice to say that prayer is useless, prayer is self-defeating, that while prayer might make you feel better while your child is suffering, that is no virtue. You pray yourselves. You think it is a noble and generous act for your representatives to prowl the corridors of hospitals, preying on the desperation of the sick. You abase yourselves before false hopes, and sacrifice human dignity on an altar built from the bones of the dead. You would spread the poison, piously excusing yourselves because you only want to administer sub-lethal doses.

You are Abraham’s enablers. I hope you all feel a small tremor of guilt when you sit your own children down at bedtime to beg a nonexistent being for aid, when you plant the seed of futile supplication and surrender to delusions in their trusting minds. Damn you all.

Look, I can’t believe what hypocrites these people are, given that Ms. Neumann seemed to require medical attention during the first day, and didn’t demand that they leave her alone and just pray for her, but…

I continue to hope these people never see their children ever again since they are more than happy to murder them.

Further, I hope the exact same thing happens to these people who are trying to murder their son, Daniel Hauser.   These people are actually wore because they know EXACTLY what is wrong with him (the Neumann’s appear to have purposefully kept themselves unaware) and EXACTLY what the standard treatment will accomplish (something like 90% recovery rate) and they don’t care.  They care more about some religious/philosophical issue than saving their son.

Thats what it comes down to, and THAT is why people like this are dangerous.  They believe that magic and mystic spirits and souls are more important than real life.  And THAT is why they can’t be allowed near children.  There are no threats, no punishments, that can exceed the power these supernatural entities hold over them.

They are the sickness of awareness, of consciousness.  They are the disease.

(btw, I’m also fucking sick of the whole ‘parents rights’ issue that the media keep bringing into the situation, any more than beating your child with a bat is a ‘parents rights’ issue, or raping your daughter is a parents rights issue, or any of the other methods of abuse we don’t allow in this country)

From StreetProphets

I don’t know what I find the most tragic aspect of this case to be.  That a child suffered and died a needless death.  That the parents of the child had such a narrow and distorted faith that their actions led to that death.  That those same parents now face charges and jail time on top of the anguish they must be feeling.  That there are three children without a sister and possibly without their parents.

This is what I was talking about.  Because these people did it in the name of faith, somehow it is tragic that they may be sent to jail for bringing about the death of their daughter.  If the parents had said, instead, that fighting off the condition on her own would make her stronger (an equally crazy viewpoint), there wouldn’t be one drop of sympathy.  Or if they’d done it because they just hate doctors, or distrust medicine for some other reason. 

I do feel bad that the other children are going to be seperated from their parents, however that increases their chances of survival markedly.

Religion should not be an excuse, should not be a ‘get out of jail free’ card.

They’ll almost certainly get away with it too.  All the defense has to do is convince one person on the jury that if we require people to be responsible for their actions taken in the name of religion then religious freedom will vanish.

All that has to happen is for one person to realize that they too might be held accountable.

All that has to happen is for one person to understand that they will no longer have a free pass because of ‘faith’. 

Thats all.

How hard could that be?

Deep down inside, I know that Madeline’s death is our fault as a nation.  We let them get away with it.  We refuse to ever question anything about religious beliefs (unless you are a scientologist…).

And, because of that, people continue to act without rational justification and we continue to say its OK. 

We continue to act as if faith in magic is a good thing to be praised.  We continue to let people make policy based on this magic and never question them or force them to back up their beliefs.  Perhaps if we didn’t, then someone would have felt free to call an ambulance, or the police.  But they didn’t.  And it isn’t surprising.

We don’t just grant freedom of religion (which is a good thing) but we give it complete and utter immunity.  No other freedom comes close to this.  Not speach, not bearing arms, not press.

Only religion can’t be questioned.

We killed that little girl.

Its OK, we killed our daughter because of our religion.  Shouldn’t we get a free pass?

A day before Madeline died, according to the criminal complaint, the father wrote an e-mail with the headline, “Help our daughter needs emergency prayer!!!!.” It said his daughter was “very weak and pale at the moment with hardly any strength.”

Fuck you.

Well, the other 3 kids have been removed from the Neumann home during the investigation.  What keeps coming up is how there wasn’t any ‘intent’ on the parents part.  They honestly thought they were doing the right thing.

Parents who physically abuse their children often say the same.  ‘They had to learn a lesson’ or ‘my parents did the same to me’. 

Maybe these people shouldn’t go to jail.

They should be committed to a psychiatric hospital and never have their kids back.

They called their church the night before

On the night before 11-year-old Madeline Kara Neumann died of complications from untreated diabetes, her parents did not call a doctor. Instead, Dale and Leilani Neumann prayed over the telephone Saturday with the founder of a religious Web site named americaslastdays.com

So lets make sure the record is straight. She was very sick. The parents knew she was. Experts say she’d probably been getting sicker and sicker for a month.
The parents knew it was bad.
So they prayed instead of getting her medical attention.
Criminal.
Child abuse.
Schitzophrenia.